How fitting that Eastern Europe proved to be one of the few holdouts for quality black metal just as the more world-renowned scenes began to decline at the turn of the century. In the last twenty plus years artists from Poland, Ukraine, Romania, and of course Russia were all releasing work that challenged the maturity... Continue Reading →

Ezra Brooks/Serpent Rider: Visions of Esoteric Splendor (Split)Out 22nd October on No Remorse Records This split EP provides a welcome holdout for proudly traditional heavy metal, offering many rewards and lessons for the discerning listener. Ezra Brooks is a Canadian solo act, brainchild of one Shawn Vincent, which here deliveries plenty of infectious heavy metal,... Continue Reading →

The best of death metal is notoriously fleeting, with today’s canon still chiefly consisting of releases from a brief moment in time when the stars aligned in the early 1990s. Of the two artists discussed today, there has been much speculation as to their possible artistic direction had they endured. Would they have unseated their... Continue Reading →

Conjureth: Majestic DissolveOut 25th October on Memento Mori Following two impressive but tantalisingly short EPs in ‘Foul Formations’ and ‘The Levitation Manifest’, both released in 2020, San Diego’s Conjureth emerge from the chrysalis fully formed on their debut album ‘Majestic Dissolve’. Both EPs offered new interpretations of old forms by marrying the percussive chromaticism of... Continue Reading →

If the term “gatekeeping” once served a purpose it has certainly been all but lost in the aether by now. Where once it was a disparagement thrown at self-appointed policers of culture, today its common usage has become a canary in the coalmine for our decaying relationship with art. A term that has mutated culture... Continue Reading →

Goatcraft continues to stubbornly defy a neatly marketable genre tag on these brand new tracks taken from their upcoming album 'Sic Transit Gloria Mundi'. This artist has been honing a sound between dark ambient and classical piano music for over a decade now. In placing the piano front and centre there is no finer demonstration... Continue Reading →

Journey into Darkness: Infinite Universe Infinite DeathOut 10th September on Spirit Coffin Publishing Journey into Darkness’s third LP ‘Infinite Universe Infinite Death’ jettisons some of the baggage of symphonic metal's contested past, cutting the fat from a bloated style with class and poise. This homage to the vastness of space eschews the barren soundscapes of... Continue Reading →

Vortex of End: Abhorrent FervorOut 24th Sept on Osmose Productions Progressive blackened death metal is a genre that promises much but delivers little. More often than not it manages to take the worst elements of all three antecedents and concoct them into conceptually overbaked nonsense music. The directionless and frustrating riffs for riffs sake of... Continue Reading →

The initial loadstone for foundational black metal was an explicit exercise in self-limitation. Cut the fat away from metal as it was becoming by the late 1980s, the meaty production, the excessive riffs, the complex and the bouncy rhythms and what are you left with? Obviously this ascetic quest was quickly jettisoned by the turn... Continue Reading →

Necronautical: Slain in the SpiritOut 20th August on Candlelight Records Mancunian symphonic black metallists return with album number four: ‘Slain in the Spirit’; displaying that oft sought but rarely found blend of undeniable continuity with the past and expanded horizons. Symphonic black metal can be a highly dense form of music at times. Ethereal iterations... Continue Reading →